SimCity Multiplayer: Competition and Experimentation

In video games, and more specifically older SimCity titles, your city has always existed in a vacuum. That's all set to change in 2013 with the release of Maxis' newest SimCity, a game whose world is brought together through online play and a gameplay initiative the studio refers to as SimCity World.

"When I first came on this project, almost three years ago now, one of the first things I really felt, if we were going to make the first SimCity, it had to be multiplayer," said Lead Designer Stone Librande. For Librande and the team it just made sense -- most games have a multiplayer component these days, and having an interconnected world brings the sim experience to new levels. The team thus set out with a design goal to create a game that attempted to bring to life the real-life dynamic that cities experience as they work with one another for resources and to fulfill the needs of their citizens. If you create a ton of pollution in your city, it can run over into the neighboring cities in your region. Likewise if you and the potentially millions of other cities flood the market with coal you could drive the price way down.

If you don't want to, you're not required to play with other players on a city-to-city level. Everyone gets their own region, and you only play with others if you invite them to settle in your region or open it up to everyone. Heck, you could even populate an entire region with cities that you exclusively control, manipulating them so that they create a symbiotic network that strengthens the region as a whole.

If you start out alone but decide you want to invite people, Maxis is aiming to make it as easy as possible through a friends list. Attached to your friends list is the CityLog feature of SimCity World, which lets you quickly see what your friends are up to, invite them to your game or just keep in touch. CityLog gives you snappy updates on pertinent actions by people in your social circles, letting you react to what they're doing and, hopefully, keep you feeling like you're a part of a greater community.

If that were all SimCity World had to offer it'd kind of feel like a stripped-down in-game Facebook, but its real purpose is to add a bit of a competitive aspect to SimCity. For starters there are Challenges: global events that Maxis will roll out from time to time in order to get players motivated to accomplish greater goals. These could be initiatives like seeing who can grow their population the most within a certain amount of in-game time, or even something like making regions compete to see who can lower their pollution the most.

Leaderboards are also another component of SimCity World. Maxis tracks a number of stats such as population, crime rate, money and more, and ranks players based on their progress. Like Challenges, though, all stats are based on periods of game time instead of real time. The reason for this is because Librande doesn't want, "to incentivize the person who plays non-stop or forces you to stay up all night just to get to the top...that's not quality gameplay." So for instance if you were trying to go for the highest income, you would only ever have your most recent in-game year counted towards your Leaderboard placement.

You can ignore Leaderboards and Challenges if you don't like being competitive, but the Global Market part of SimCity World is unavoidable. Commodities can be bought and sold, and essential ones like coal are finite, pushing city leaders to the marketplace. Just like real life prices will fluctuate based on demand, though a hard cap is put on the top and bottom to prevent things from becoming too cheap or too expensive. Goods can also be traded amongst players in a region, but you can't trade between multiple regions.

Being involved with so many other players, even your friends, has risks. Outside of the more obvious ways they can affect you such as pollution or withholding promised resources, there's also always the chance they'll just abandon their city (this can be done voluntarily). If this happens you can always open up your region to the public, invite someone new or even take over the city yourself. How long it takes for a city to become abandoned is still being determined. Abandonment could be a detriment to a region, or even seen as a negative by some people, but to Librande it presents exciting opportunities. "The idea is that you can kind of make little scenarios and then invite your friends in to pick up where you left off," said Librande,"So you can start up a town maybe put a few problems in and then say, 'Come in here and see if you can solve these problems.'"

Librande hopes that even players who start out playing alone will eventually be lured by the appeal of online interaction."When you get real personalities involved, compared to playing by yourself or AI," said Librande, "the game takes on an extra depth to it...Sure, your neighbor might be a jerk or he might not play the way you really want to, but in terms of feeling like you're running a city and dealing with problems real cities have to face? It's kind of a cool story comes out of it." These interactions, even if they turn ugly, are exactly what Librande and Maxis want to see when SimCity releases in February of 2013.